Brief analysis of the rise and fall of the Spanish assembly movement during the post-Franco “transition” in Spain during the late 1970s, written by a member of the Encyclopedie des Nuisances, in 1984.
by Miguel Amorós at LibCom via thefreeonline at https://wp.me/pIJl9-Ghw
The revolutionary strike: Vitoria, spain, 1976 |
The wave of strikes that swept through Vitoria, spain, in 1976, culminating in a city wide general strike on March the 3rd, were a revolutionary moment that sought to break with the controlled transition, after the dictator Francisco Franco’s death, towards a more modern form of capitalist political administration.On the 3rd of March, the general strike was successful from the very early hours of the morning. The stoppage was total, in factories and companies, including at Michelín, which had not known a work stoppage since the failed strike of 1972.
From the morning on, the atmosphere was tense and the first woundings by gun fire occurred. But it would be towards five o’clock in the afternoon, the time at which had been called an assembly at the Church of San Francisco, when the bells of death sounded. After gassing the filled church, those who sought to flee the hell were met with gunfire. The result was five dead and hundreds wounded. The recordings of the police conversations at the time reveal the magnitude of the tragedy..
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Report on the Assembly Movement – Miguel Amorós
The workers assembly movement that shook Spain from 1976 to 1978 was neither more nor less than the independent manifestation of the proletariat, and as a consequence, the confirmation of the existence of the class struggle in a country where both the dictatorship as well as the politicians of the transition had fought against it for forty years by concealing it.
It was the spontaneous response of the Spanish proletariat to the political exhaustion of Francoism, superimposed on the general economic crisis then affecting the capitalist world, at the very moment when the dictatorship was attempting a controlled adaptation of its institutions to democratic forms, and the capitalist world was attempting to carry out a process of modernization of the spectacular market economy that would dissolve the second proletarian assault against class society.
But this did not imply the mere rejection of a backward fascist political regime, that is, Francoism, and even less any kind of support for an anti-Francoist replacement option.
Continue reading “How the Workers Assemblies almost sparked Revolution as Spanish Fascism finally collapsed – 1977”
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